Do novelists have free will? Part 2

When we look at how our minds really work, there’s a strong case to be made that free will isn’t as important as free won’t. We all have a strong intuition that we’re ultimately responsible for how we act and behave, but what we think of as our deliberate actions seem to arise from a stratum of the brain that isn’t normally accessible to conscious thought, and we often unconsciously set ourselves in motion long before we’re aware of making that choice. Benjamin Libet, whose famous experiment was the one that cast grave doubts on the idea of volitional control in the first place, proposed an elegant solution to this apparent problem: the role of consciousness is to veto certain proposals from the unconscious mind while approving others, sifting through and evaluating the possible actions with which it’s presented. This veto power, if it exists, necessarily takes place in a very short window of time, something on the order of a tenth of a second. But if you were to slow down the process and translate the results into a concrete, tangible form, you’d have something oddly similar to what an author experiences while writing a novel—except that the character you’re creating is yourself.

Writing fiction is certainly one of the most peculiar pursuits in which a human being can engage, but really, it’s not so different from any other kind of focused human activity. In theory, you have complete freedom to write whatever you want on the blank page, but in practice, it isn’t so straightforward. You can’t write a sentence without being constrained by the conventions of language, by your own abilities, and by your mood when you sit down at your desk. Ideas, both big and small, generally don’t arise from an effort of the will: they appear, mysteriously, from some shadowy part of the brain. Yet a good writer can influence even the factors over which he seems to have little control, less through what he does in the moment than by what he’s done at every moment before. You can improve your craft over time, increasing the range of possible sentences you’re able to write; you can develop habits that will allow you to write in any emotional state; you can even learn to generate ideas on demand. Or you can do none of this. Whichever way you go, though, you’ll find that your small, unconscious artistic choices are really determined by the seeds you’ve planted in the past—which is a lot like how it works in real life.

Of course, that doesn’t bring us any closer to cracking the problem of free will. As Sam Harris might point out, and has, even if we can influence ourselves with our past behavior, that still doesn’t explain what influenced the influences. But there’s another stage in the writing process that does look a lot—at least to me—like the product of conscious choice, and that’s revision. “For artists, writing has always meant, in effect, the art of endless revising,” John Gardner says, and to the extent that a writer’s personality is expressed in his work, it’s in how he chooses to revise. First drafts are the id of the writing life: they’re rough, unconsidered, and as horrifying in their own way as the unwanted thoughts we encounter in dreams or in our less guarded moments. I suspect that the rough drafts of all writers at the same level of experience look more or less the same, which is to say, awful. In revision, though, you find yourself evaluating the choices you made the first time around, deleting the ones that don’t work and refining the ones that do, and the result, however far it may fall short of your intentions, comes as close to a fully considered action as a human being is capable of achieving.

My argument, then, is that free will in art is something that unfolds over time. Each choice we make may be accidental, serendipitous, or random when it first occurs, but it’s in the act of selecting, polishing, and editing, executed over the course of many months, that we start to find true freedom. And that’s the way it works in life, too. I may be the product of influences I can’t control or decisions I made without conscious deliberation when I was much younger, but it’s in my ongoing attempt to revise myself as a person—using the input of those hidden processes while also subjecting them to what feels like a higher level of consideration—that responsibility enters the picture. Free will seems to disappear the more closely we look at it, just as I’d have trouble explaining why I chose one word over another as I typed this sentence, but it emerges once we stand back to look at the system and its evolution as a whole. This kind of revision, with influences on the smallest scale affecting the larger which affects the smaller in turn, is something we all exercise from one minute to the next, and if it isn’t freedom, it’s close enough to make the distinction seem irrelevant. Because if writing is the art of endless revising, that’s true of life as well.

That’s actually a great example of what I’m talking about here: your characters are active in your subconscious mind, and your authorial intelligence accepts or rejects the various actions they propose. (My characters sometimes act of their own accord, too, but I don’t let them do everything they want.)

How can one explain their will to become a writer in the first place? How can one account for the reason why they chose literary art over illustrative art? Our “wills are a mystery, but our choices between competing wills is all that matters in life.

“Our choices between competing wills is all that matters in life.” That’s exactly right. And while my initial impulse to become a writer may be a mystery even to me, unlike my impulses to become a paleontologist or a monk, it led to a series of sustained choices over time that add up, at least to my eyes, to something like free will.